An open thread dedicated to discussing books, movies, and tv shows we love. And occasionally some politics.

I thought today I'd write about the episode that converted me, entirely against my expectations, into a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Now I'm not usually much of a genre snob. Not only do I love cheesy films (I'm a fan of both Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the Lost Skeleton of Cadavra) I also like all kinds of low and high movies. I'm just as happy watching GalaxyQuest as I am Sense and Sensibility, just as engaged by Galavant as I am by Rectify. I even like The Scorpion King starring Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson. (Did I mention I'm a former wrestling fan too?)

But I have to admit that in a rare moment of genre snobbery, I allowed my bias against the premise of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as well as the title itself (Buffy? Seriously, Joss?), to keep me from trying the show out till friends told me I had to see the fourth-season episode "Hush."

Meet "The Gentlemen."
(Warning: if horror easily triggers you, stop watching at 2:00 sharp! But please do take a look at the beginning, because the imagery here is amazing, and, I think, deeply significant.)

In the script of "Hush," the Gentlemen are fairy-tale monsters. I certainly hope Joss Whedon made that up (I'm pretty sure he did) because I wouldn't want these to be monsters that exist in any actual folktale. They come to a town. And the first thing they do...

Is steal everyone's voices.

It gets better.

The reason they're stealing people's voices is to make it impossible to scream for help when they remove a person's heart and put it in a jar.

"Can't even shout.
Can't even cry.
The Gentlemen are coming by.
Looking in windows,
knocking on doors...
They need to take seven
and they might take yours...
Can't call to mom.
Can't say a word.
You're gonna die screaming
but you won't be heard."

Now, supposedly Joss Whedon came up with this conceit because he wanted to challenge himself as a director, and he thought an almost entirely silent episode would be a good way to do that. OK, I buy that. But it's never accidental or casual when a writer talks about silence, particularly not a writer as astute as Joss Whedon in a culture like ours. In an incredibly creepy coincidence, "Hush" aired in December 1999, almost exactly a year before things got extremely interesting, shall we say, in America. Which makes it even creepier that the episode begins with a premonition:

Let's return to the imagery of the Gentlemen.

I included a video because all the still images don't do the imagery justice. What's most important about the Gentlemen, apart from, perhaps, their name, is the way they move. Their feet never touch the ground. They glide through the air like a knife slides through soft butter. This creates the sense that they are somehow not fully part of this physical world. They are impervious to bullets or other weapons. They never touch anyone except to cut out their hearts, with something that looks like medical instruments that they carry in a black bag. They don't seem to touch anything except their bags, their instruments, the hearts they take from people, and the jars in which they store the hearts.

You'd think that, since the Gentlemen don't touch people except with their scalpels, you could run from them. That's where the Gentlemen's minions come in. Wrapped in what looks like straitjackets, lumbering along on the ground with their faces hidden, human in form but bestial in manner, these minions grab the Gentlemen's victims for them and hold them down while they perform their operations.

I'd say that the Gentlemen were an image of aristocracy, because of their name. But there's something horribly upper-middle class about them. They really look like bankers, or doctors, professional class:

And the counterpoint between the Gentlemen, who interact very little with the physical world, and their minions, who seem like they're all body with little or no mind, trailing after the Gentlemen like their dogs down on the ground, reminds me of an old dichotomy I was uncomfortable with in Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis: the workers (the "hands") and the intelligentsia who are also, somehow, the 1%, the owners (the "head"). The famous quotation from the movie is "The mediator between head and hands must be the heart," which Lang meant, I think, in terms of introducing compassion to the relations between the classes. Yet, at the same time, by so solidly identifying the working class with "hands" and the ruling elites with "head" and putting both into an inescapable relationship with one directing the other, Lang ironically made a movie that the Nazis really liked, even though he didn't like the Nazis. Roger Ebert writes:

Although Lang saw his movie as anti-authoritarian, the Nazis liked it enough to offer him control of their film industry (he fled to the United States instead). Some of the visual ideas in “Metropolis” seem echoed in Leni Riefenstahl's pro-Hitler “Triumph of the Will” (1935) — where, of course, they have lost their irony.
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-metropolis-2010-restoratio...

I could be reading into "Hush," of course, but there's something about the visual dichotomy Whedon's drawing that keeps nudging my brain. And if he is citing Metropolis, he sure is making a comment on what it means to have the heart mediate between the head and the hands.

Even if he isn't, the class dichotomy seems inescapable. If they are the Gentlemen, the lowly creatures that follow and obey them must be their servants, mustn't they? And it's the function of those servants to grab and hold people down while they do terrible things to them.

Perhaps it's wrong of me to think about how the elites use the police and private security firms in connection with "Hush." I certainly don't see every police officer as having lost their individuality, their ability to choose, their humanity. But isn't that what the job as it's often constituted asks those men and women to do, whether they comply or not?

In any case

Buffy's question is the relevant one.

How do I get my voice back?